Joelle Wallach grew up in Morocco before making her home in New York City and holds a master’s degree from Columbia University. She attained her doctorate from Manhattan School of Music (where she studied with John Corigliano). Her website, by the way (joellewallach.com), is a beautiful surfing experience, gorgeous of design and informative of content. As to the music itself, Wallach writes with confident assurance. Many of her songs are little gems.

The song The Cloths of Heaven is based on a poem by W. B. Yeats, and delivered by the deliciously light tenor of Stephen Alexander Carroll. The text speaks of a gorgeous romantic ideal, something which perhaps informs the rather strange idea of setting a real (anonymous) personal ad in The New York Review of Books. Again, the singer (this time soprano Marie Therese Mattingley) is fresh and appealing of voice; she is appealingly teasing in the song Making Love to the Milkman (“is this a fantasy or not?” is the question). Avis Stroud is a wonderful mezzo, her voice burnished but not heading towards the contralto. When Lost in the Forest is a whimsical song based on the Northwest Indians’ reliance on Nature’s wisdom. She sings the Spiritual (“Rocks and the firm roots of trees”) with a real heartfelt feel for the genre. The spiritual leads in to the first non-vocal piece, Runes and Ritual (for piano and strings). The title refers to the myth, magic, and folklore of Virginia. Wallach skillfully and evocatively takes a wide variety of material and gestures (from hymn tune to lullaby), turning them into a contrapuntal web that is really quite magical in and of itself. The piece easily sustains its 13-minute duration. The return to song, with Stroud as soloist, in Let Evening Come (on a text by Jane Kenyon) is most effective. The song is a meditation on oncoming death and in response Wallach invokes a crepuscular type of radiance. The Door Standing Open is a set of four songs on spiritual torment. There is identifiably more angst present, as befits the subject matter. Baritone Jeffrey Snider sings with great authority.

The purity of Close Your Eyes (text D. H. Lawrence), a plea for emotions in love, is rapt and full of wonder, a proper contrast to the set of four songs just heard. The most desolate music on the disc is reserved for “Assurance” (the second and last song of The Nightwatch). Here piano textures are disintegrated down to a low-pitched minimum under a high, keening, mournful tenor line. The recording’s strengths (superb reproduction of vocal timbre and piano sound) are shown to their absolute best here. Alexander Carroll reveals he is capable of depth too in Broken-faced Gargoyles, a telling depiction in music of the numb emotional exhaustion that can accompany the loss of a loved one. The mood seems to bleed into the first movement of Wallach’s Second String Quartet which itself refers to a poem by Yeats and which was composed in the aftermath of the untimely death of her husband. The effect of the music is of tracking the various stages of someone’s grief (bereavement theory is a notoriously tricky area, in which various writers have named various stages, but the problem is that the stages often overlap and rarely come “in order”). What we have here, then, are the stages of Wallach’s own grief, laid bare in what must surely have been a cathartic, not to mention brave, essay. The performance is simply beautiful, the whole experience infinitely touching. The actual title of the disc is “The Door Standing Open,” which apart from being the title of the mini-song cycle could, I suppose, have multiple meanings regarding bereavement. Or maybe I’m reading too much in to it. Recommended.

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